A Work In Progress

|| Silver or Kit || she/they || I sometimes post writing to Silverwind578 on ao3 || 

[icaseybaybee]

[lettuce-from-the-salad-bar]

[excerpto]

Me: i support the fetishistic nature of this content but NOT the mischaracterization

[tami-taylors-hair]

Oh?? My?? GAWD???

[mariacallous]

[acti-veg]

‘While bats can only sense the outer shapes and textures of their targets, dolphins can peer inside theirs. If a dolphin echolocates on you, it will perceive your lungs and your skeleton. It can likely sense shrapnel in war veterans and fetuses in pregnant women. It can pick out the air-filled swim bladders that allow fish, their main prey, to control their buoyancy.

It can almost certainly tell different species apart based on the shape of those air bladders. And it can tell if a fish has something weird inside it, like a metal hook. In Hawaii, false killer whales often pluck tuna off fishing lines, and “they’ll know where the hook is inside that fish,” Aude Pacini, who studies these animals, tells me. “They can ‘see’ things that you and I would never consider unless we had an X-ray machine or an MRI scanner.”

This penetrating perception is so unusual that scientists have barely begun to consider its implications. The beaked whales, for example, are odontocetes that look dolphin-esque on the outside—but on the inside, their skulls bear a strange assortment of crests, ridges, and bumps, many of which are only found in males.

Pavel Gol’din has suggested that these structures might be the equivalent of deer antlers—showy ornaments that are used to attract mates. Such ornaments would normally protrude from the body in a visible and conspicuous way, but that’s unnecessary for animals that are living medical scanners.’

-Ed Yong, An Immense World

[namu-the-orca]

Cetacean echolocation is one of those things that boggles your mind once you really start to think about the implications. They can see each others' hearts beating fast with fear or excitement. They can see if another dolphin is healthy, or pregnant; how the fetus is doing; if they have ingested debris. Their echolocation is also incredibly precise: a bottlenose dolphin could discriminate between cilinders differing in wall thickness by just 0.23 mm (0.009 inch) from 8 meters away!! And they certainly notice when something is off.

I'm not sure if I ever shared this story before here, but in Curacao, when I was allowed to assist in a guest interaction programme, there was suddenly consternation in the pool behind us. A guest had entered the water and the dolphins were going crazy, paying no heed to the trainers anymore. The lead trainer that was with me gave the dolphins to me to watch over while she went to help. When she came back she told me what had happened. The guest that had caused so much uproar had left the water again and was asked if he had done anything to upset the dolphins. He hadn't, and he couldn't imagine what was wrong... until he mentioned he had a pacemaker. The younger dolphins in the pool had never seen someone with a pacemaker before and apparently it rocked their world.

It was such a wild experience, and offered such a cool insight into how dolphins experience their world. I'll never forget it.

[typhlonectes]

Ouroboros Pie Crust by Danielle Baskin

[prokopetz]

One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and

Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn't catch you.

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Thou wouldst not downloadeth a car

[freegiftjones]

one time i was making potato soup and i needed broth for it but i was out of broth. but in my dog food cabinet there was a carton of chicken broth that i had bought for my dog. now the box did say HUMAN GRADE and the ingredients were just bog standard chicken broth. it did say something about joint health for dogs on there. but the ingredients were normal. i even compared the ingredients list to some normal person broth and they were the same. so i did put dog broth in that soup and it did taste completely normal. but i did use the dog broth.

[chicknparm]

[penny-anna]

one argument you often see about fanfiction is that it's like 'training wheels' writing? like 'oh it's fine to do that while you're still learning, it's easier than coming up with your own ideas'. and I have to say I have just never agreed with that.

[penny-anna]

in my experience it's actually pretty common for newbie fanfiction writers to gravitate towards coming up with OCs rather than writing about the canon characters (hence the infamous Mary Sue); this suggests that many people find that 'easier' than attempting to write about pre-existing characters.

I would say that recreating the characterisation, mood and general vibes of an existing work of fiction is in fact a skill in and of itself that's acquired via practice. A common compliment delivered to fanfiction writers is how well they have captured the spirit of the original work. Inexperienced fanfiction writers fail to do this.

When creating an original character you can, ultimately, say anything about them and now it's canon bcos you created them and you said so. conversely, well, if you are covering a well known song and start playing the wrong notes people will notice immediately.

In addition: a lot of fanfiction, IMO, is in actuality a form of metafictional literary analysis. a story where two characters sit down and talk about their feelings about a canonical event? literary analysis, which is of course a skill. Sometimes fanfiction is bad bcos the writer is not good at interpreting texts.

finally I have made this point before but you never really see anyone suggesting that fictional works based on existing public domain texts are on 'easy mode'. is it 'easier' to write something based on a copyrighted work than a public domain work? Of course it isn't.

[penny-anna]

I know I said 'finally' but I forgot a point:

A major strength of the transformative work is its ability to create dramatic irony. If a fanfiction's emotional resonance is dependent on being familiar with the source material that's not necessarily a bad thing. sometimes it's a sign that the author has done a really skillful job of engaging with said source material.

[annabelle--cane]

thinking about that line in ntn where john says that the main thing p--- did as a cop on earth ten thousand years ago was throw school discos and tell the drugs kids to stop doing drugs and also wondering if pyrrha ever properly met honesty lol

[darlingflowersstuff]

Andrew and Aaron being identical is so fucking funny when you think about Andrew being a famous pro Exy player and Aaron being a doctor bc imagine:

you twist your ankle. you go to the hospital. you’re waiting for a doctor to come see you. he pulls back the curtain and- holy shit it’s LeBron-Fucking-James

[sentinel-babes]

[herbertwest]

"Hope this doesn't awaken anything in me," I say of something that's already showered and had breakfast

[anarqueeen]

you fucking idiot. you misread a social encounter. we're gonna fucking kill you

[realismomagico]

life really is about being 13 and ridiculously into percy jackson books. after that whatever idk

[cosmicretreat]

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

my farming sim game will have animal butchery as a normalized part of the gameplay loop to act as a lightning rod to draw all the discourse and thinkpieces away from topics that would annoy me more

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

in my farming sim game that has animal butchery as a normalized part of the gameplay loop, shipped products will be sold on a weekly basis, not a daily one. you get a big windfall once a week and then you budget around that. if you want more money in the interim you have to go sell to the local merchants whatever products they specialize in.

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

in my farming sim game, getting married to one of the townspeople will have a significant impact on your gameplay. if you marry the rival farmer, their smaller farm will be merged with yours. if you marry the town alchemist/doctor you get a buff to all your alchemy and you wake up from getting knocked out in your own home instead of their clinic. if you marry the priestess she uh, idk she does weather related divine magic for you so you can choose the weather, idk i haven't thought too hard about that one yet

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

my farming sim game will have a MILF you can actually F

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

these tags are probably a joke but genuinely i do think that more games with romance candidates in general should require you to at least be on friendly terms with their family/close friends before they will romance/marry you. so yes. romancing the MILF will require attending her kid's pretend tea party first. to prove you mean business

[academic-vampire]

A crucial part of the bookstore experience is saying hi to all the books you’ve already read